Saturday, 30 November 2013

Jolla - Developers Dream Phone

Jolla - Developers Dream Phone

After three days of the first Jolla Smart Phone sold in Finland, experienced and Linux oriented customers are already sailing in deep seas with their Jolla's. In the net we can already find instructions about how to install Google Play into this phone, and a video showing how nicely GTA3 is running on Jolla Sailfish OS.So modifying the Jolla's OpenSource Sailfish OS is possible, and Jolla has made it easy too - In the phone settings you can change the phone to Developer Mode (caution on this, this is really ment for experienced users). No other mobile OS offer a developer mode, but in other systems like Android this can be done a bit trickier, via rooting the phone.

It's obvious that Jolla hasn't offered this option without purpose. As they aim to wide use of their gesture based operating system worldwide, there are few benefits for themselves offering this option.

Some possible benefits to Jolla for offering customers a Developer Mode:

Jolla is looking for the best individual developers to hire them

Jolla gives part of their own work to the community, and via that offering better updates faster to all their customers (this kind of community work is common in Linux based, OpenSource enviroments)

Jolla is hoping for users to develope some of The Other Halfs

Jolla needs native Sailfish Apps fast, and this is one way to offer complete test devices for all interested in developing

Jolla's Sailfish starts to spread around the world directly via the community

Jolla gains the votes from experienced mobile enthustiastics, and gains some marketing value via them

I see Jolla's phones as a huge marketing fleet for the Salefish Operating System, which seems to be the main product of the company. In future we might see Jolla running campaigns where they award their customers for their work to develope and spread Sailfish all around the world.

Jolla's strategy by Stefano Mosconi: "Our plan is a three-phase one: first, we’ll do phones that are
Jolla-branded. Then we’ll do co-branded phones – “Sailfish by Jolla.”
And then the third wave will be to license the OS to third parties so
that they can build on top of the existing open-source project -which we
plan to keep open-source- and then we’ll differentiate with the UI." "Give a million ships to free, open minded sailors and follow them visiting all the harbours of the world, equipping their ships even better and showing their nice ships to their friends, inviting them to sailing with them"